Opinion: Why mental health test for gun ownership is a slippery slope

U.S. President Donald Trump says stricter gun control measures might have led to additional casualties during a mass shooting at a South Texas church. (Nov. 7)
AP

A Ruger AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, center, the same model, though in gray rather than black, used by the shooter in a Texas church massacre two days earlier, sits on display with other rifles on a wall in a gun shop Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2017, in Lynnwood, Wash. Gun-rights supporters have seized on the Texas church massacre as proof of the well-worn saying that the best answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, say the tragedy shows once more that it is too easy to get a weapon in the U.S. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)(Photo: Elaine Thompson, AP)

As a Life Member of the National Rifle Association I don’t know any member who thinks the truly mentally ill should have unrestricted access to weapons of any kind. The problem we have is what the criteria are for restriction and who gets to decide.

I’ve been called a “nut” simply because I believe in and have extensively studied the legal history of the Second Amendment. Is the fact I’m well-educated about, and choose to exercise, my historical right to own firearms the clinical criteria for being “nuts?”

I know police officers suffering from PTSD resulting from experiences on the job. Should they be deprived of their firearms? Or military medics with PTSD from their service? If they seek treatment, should they lose a constitutional right they served to protect?

Buy Photo

Gary Beatty retired as assistant state attorney in the Brevard County State Attorney’s Office.(Photo: Malcolm Denemark/FLORIDA TODAY)

During my 30 years as a prosecutor I encountered many cases where a defendant’s mental status was an issue. I both utilized and challenged, “mental health experts” from throughout the country.

You can hire an accredited “mental health expert” to testify under oath to any conclusion you need. There are few objective criteria about “mental” health. Conclusions backed up by objective standards on which “experts” on both sides agree are rare. Ultimately a jury of lay persons decides whom to trust. Feedback I’ve gotten from many jurors is they disregard the “psycho-babble” from all the experts.

Then there is the problem of biased experts. I’ve gotten some to admit their opposition to the death penalty leads them to “always find a mental deficiency” that would preclude imposition of a death sentence. Outcome-determinative bias is likely in experts who personally advocate gun control.

Assuming a person is found unfit to own a firearm, how long would the incapacity last? In 1975 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled persons committed to mental institutions, who had committed no crime, can’t be held for life because that violates the Constitution. Can a person who has committed no crime be deprived of the Second Amendment right for life?

Justice Joseph Story in his seminal 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution said, “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”

The Second Amendment (and Article I, Section 8, of the Florida Declaration of Rights) is not about hunting or sport shooting. It’s about citizens having the ability to defend themselves from our own rulers.

The rights enshrined in the Constitution aren’t government largesse. They are ours by right of birth. Giving the government the power to decide who is mentally competent to have those rights is a dangerous concept. Using “mental health” to suppress and confine dissidents is a favorite tool of totalitarian regimes.

Gary Beatty lives in Sharpes and is retired from 30 years as an assistant state attorney in Brevard County. He has a doctorate in law and is certified in criminal trial law by the Florida Bar.